The Bad Book Affair

23

Maurice Morris was not a bad man as such. He’d gone into politics for the same reason that everyone else goes into politics-to make a difference and to do good. And he believed that he had done good. He had nothing whatsoever to reproach himself with.

Which is why, on the morning of the election, he was able to look himself fair and square in the eye in the bathroom mirror and find nothing amiss. If he said so himself-and he did say so, Maurice believed in articulating his own self-worth-he was looking pretty good. “Looking pretty good,” he said. He had a radiance about him. He wasn’t only blessed with good looks and with good luck, he was pretty damn smart too. He knew he must be smart because he didn’t know anyone else who’d grown up on the Shankill Road in Belfast and gone to Campbell College, a private school for boys, even though his father was only a postman, and then gone on to found Northern Ireland’s most successful independent financial advisers, and then gone on to become an MLA in the local assembly, and who had lost his seat, but who was now about to be gloriously reelected. He had achieved far and away above what might have been expected of him. His life had a trajectory, a story.

And he had pulled off quite a coup. His daughter had been reunited with him the night before the election-graciously returned by the librarians-and in enough time for the six o’clock news to cover it. And for the papers to have it for their headline. If that didn’t win him votes, then nothing would.

He looked good in his plain black suit. He should wear black suits more often: he was usually inclined toward pinstripes, with statement linings. Frank Sinatra wore plain black suits, of course, and Frank was one of his great heroes, the epitome of fifties cool. He was lucky enough to have seen Sinatra sing with Tony Bennett in Vegas, late 1980s. The voice was gone, but Frank was still soldiering on. Still in the tux. “My Way.” “Luck Be a Lady.” “Come Fly with Me.” When people said Sinatra was a crook, what they didn’t understand was where he was coming from-born the son of immigrants, worked as a young man as a riveter in the shipyard. This was someone who had made himself what he was. And that took courage and bravado and commitment. That’s just what it took.

His wife called from downstairs.

“It’s time to go!”

He winked at himself in the mirror and intoned his current favorite motivational slogan: “Winners do things differently.”

At the Devines’ farm, meanwhile, Israel Armstrong splashed some cold water on his face, dried himself off, and forced himself to eat a spoonful of peanut butter. He already had his migraine, which had started, as usual, with a sort of headache just over his left eye, a piercing pain, and then he’d started feeling nauseous, as though on the verge of vomiting. He still had the prescription in his pocket for the SSRIs from Dr. Withers. He hadn’t yet decided: drugs, counseling? Maybe he just needed to get away from here.

He took deep breaths.

Maybe all English Jewish vegetarian mobile librarians were condemned to a life of headaches, weariness, and existential despair.

He glanced at himself in the mirror. He’d decided to keep the beard, at least for the time being; it made him look suitably somber, but it was a shame he didn’t have a black suit. He was wearing a black jacket that he’d borrowed from Brownie and an old pair of black corduroys. His only shoes were his brown brogues, which didn’t look right with the jacket and trousers, so he’d found a dark brown shoe polish in the Devines’, and had dabbed some on and made them look darker. He’d bought a pair of black laces, from the Spar. They were too long.

He rang Gloria, pointlessly.

The pain in his temples was awful. He was thinking about Gloria and about Maurice Morris and Pearce Pyper, and none of it was good, and he felt inside himself a deep inclination to cry.

He decided not to.

He stepped out instead into the yard and made his way over to the farmhouse, passing the chickens in the yard, waving to the goats.

George was in the kitchen, by the Rayburn, and there was a familiar smell-not just the usual smell. This was a smell that reminded Israel of something. A homely smell. The smell of home. It smelled of parents. And Saturday traffic outside. It smelled of North London.

“What are you making?” he asked.

“Chicken livers,” said George, wiping her hands on her apron. She was wearing a black dress. Her hair was scraped back. She looked kind of Italian.

“Chicken livers,” said Israel. “I didn’t know you did chicken livers.”

“We live on a farm with chickens, Armstrong. What do you think we do with the chickens?”

“I love chicken livers.”

“I thought you were a vegetarian,” said George.

“Yes, but…Chicken livers.”

He thought for a moment of all the chickens he must have eaten in his time-all the white flesh and the brown flesh and the crispy skin, and those claws and entrails boiled up into soups. He wondered sometimes whether he’d become a vegetarian through sheer chicken fatigue, his mind and body sated with meat, fowl cravings completed.

“Do you want some?” said George.

“Well, I’ll…”

“There’s plenty: it’s for the wake.”

“No,” said Israel. “I shouldn’t, no…How do you do your chicken livers?”

“You want me to explain?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” said George. “You’re going to make it yourself?”

“I might.”

George sighed, but she explained nonetheless.

“So, you need a boiling fowl, and then you stuff the neck with dumpling ingredients, stitched at both ends, and you boil that up alongside it.”

“Right.”

“And you save the fat.”

“Schmaltz?” said Israel.

“Bless you,” said George. “And then you chop the onion, cook it in the fat.”

“OK,” said Israel.

“Then you take the livers.”

“Right.”

“And you add them.”

“OK.”

“Cook them. And then I add some hard-boiled eggs.”

She raised her hands in a gesture that suggested completion.

“And that’s it?” said Israel.

“Pretty much.”

“That’s delicious,” said Israel.

“Chickens are not what they were,” piped up old Mr. Devine from his seat. “The auld Sussex cockerel. Breastbone ye could shave with.”

“Right.”

“It’s all the thigh now. Breast and thigh. Breasts like towers. Sin and greed and wickedness.”

“Uh-huh,” said Israel.

He turned his back to old Mr. Devine and helped George to wrap kitchen foil around platters of sandwiches.

“So. Are you OK, Armstrong?” she asked, tucking up the final platter.

“Yes, I’m fine,” said Israel. “Totally fine. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“It’s going to be a difficult day,” said Israel.

“Yes,” agreed George.

“We’re all going to miss Pearce.”

“Yes we are,” said George, giving a little cough.

“‘Dear friends,’” said old Mr. Devine, “‘do not be surprised at the painful trial that ye are suffering as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ.’”

“Granda!” said George.

“1 Peter 4:12,” said old Mr. Devine, with a distinctly self-satisfied air.

“Right. And that’s meant to be some sort of comfort, is it?”

“It doesn’t do a Christian good to grieve,” said old Mr. Devine.

“All right,” said George. “That’s enough. I don’t want to hear any more from you today. Do you understand?”

Mr. Devine narrowed his eyes.

“Let’s go,” said George. “Or we’ll be late.”

So, Israel drove to Pearce Pyper’s funeral with George and old Mr. Devine, sitting on the backseat, in total silence, surrounded by sandwiches, and bread, and chicken liver pâté.

Outside Tumdrum Presbyterian there were crowds of mourners. Men with white hair. Women in hats. Gray stone buildings all around, the sky an eggshell blue; it was as though Pearce himself had painted the scene. Israel saw Linda; said hello to Seamus Fitzgibbons, Green Party candidate; embraced Minnie; nodded to Zelda; shook hands with Mrs. Onions; avoided Maurice Morris and Lyndsay and Mrs. Morris; and greeted at least half of the mobile library’s regular clientele, who had turned out in force to say good-bye to Pearce. Veronica cut him dead. The talk was of the day’s election and the return of Lyndsay Morris; Israel and Ted were congratulated on having helped find her.

At two thirty the organ music began, and Pearce’s coffin was taken into the church, Israel one of the pallbearers, along with Brownie-who’d made it back from university-and a group of Pearce’s friends, artists and aristocrats mostly, and some of them both, not the kind of people you saw every day around Tumdrum, people who wore hand-benched shoes and inherited clothes and novelty headgear. One man had a handlebar mustache; another sported a long gray ponytail and wore battered brown cowboy boots; another wore a tamo’-shanter and a kilt. The rich, it seems, wear fancy dress to a funeral. Tumdrum’s Presbyterians wear black.

Israel had never carried a coffin before. He’d been too young when his father died, and at subsequent funerals there had always been others to take the burden. The coffin weighed more than he’d expected.

“On my count, gents,” said the undertaker, and on his count they made their slow, steady procession into the church, laying Pearce on a bier at the front, and the congregation filed in behind and sat down, and the Reverend Roberts stood up and led them in prayer, and then he began to speak.

“A Christian funeral,” he said, without any introduction or ado, “is a service of worship in which God’s people witness to their faith in the hope of the Gospel, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”

People gulped and shifted in their seats as they began to adjust to the tone and the rhythm of what they were a part of. Israel took a deep breath.

“A funeral,” continued the Reverend Roberts, “is God’s way of bringing comfort to the hearts of those who mourn.” He paused. “At a funeral we read the Scriptures, and prayer is offered, and praises are sung.” Another pause. “And remembrance is cherished.” You could hear the sound of the cars outside the church, in the main square, with people going about their business, as if nothing had happened, as if life were going on as normal. “A funeral is an occasion when we, by the grace of God, bless the name of the One who gives and who takes away. Though today we mourn our loss and remember our loved one, our eyes remain fixed on Jesus, the author and finisher of the faith.” Israel felt a tightness in his chest and his throat. He tried to concentrate on the Reverend Roberts’s oratorical swing-the alliteration, the contrasts, his little triads of phrases.

Then they sang a hymn, “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended, the Darkness Falls at Thy Behest,” and Israel felt a prickling around his eyes, the early signs of tears. And then they prayed. And then there was a reading. An old friend of Pearce’s-an old, old man with a shaky voice. “A reading,” he wobbled, “from the Gospel of John, chapter fourteen.” It wasn’t the words. It was the pathos of the words being spoken, the ceremony. Israel felt himself on the brink.

And then the Reverend Roberts stood up again to speak.

“Pearce Aloysius Pyper,” began the Reverend Roberts in sonorous tones, pausing respectfully between each word-and Israel was crying now, without shame. “Our dear friend Pearce was born on the twenty-sixth of June 1918, in the last months of the First World War. He was the third child of the Reverend Julian and Margaret Pyper. They were a privileged family-Pearce’s mother, Margaret, being a descendant of the earls of Tyrone-who had a long history of serving the poor through good works. Margaret was a suffragette, and Pearce would often recall in later years his memories of the destitute and the homeless coming to his father for assistance at the rectory in Ballycastle. Pearce was sent to Sherborne preparatory school, in England, and then to Marlborough, and from there on to Brasenose College, Oxford, where, as he was always glad to report, he graduated with what he called the poet’s degree: a Third.” There was wry laughter among the university-educated in the congregation. “On coming down from university Pearce found work as a teacher before becoming a commissioned officer in the Second Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles. He was most proud in his life, he said, of having gained the Distinguished Conduct Medal-during the Second World War, for his bravery during some of the fiercest fighting following the invasion of Dunkirk.”

The congregation was able to relax now into the flow of the Reverend Roberts’s narrative. Israel found himself breathing more easily.

“After the war Pearce married Lillian Jabotinsky, the celebrated soprano, and they had two sons, both of whom, alas, predeceased their father. Pearce and Lillian’s elder son, Jacob, whom some of you will doubtless remember, became a surgeon and died aged only thirty-three, in a car crash, in 1983. Their younger son, Leon, was a conservator at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and he, alas, died of a brain hemorrhage in 1999. Pearce was enormously proud of his children, and their early and tragic deaths brought him a great sadness. We should perhaps remember today that this was a man”-and here the Reverend Roberts nodded toward Pearce’s coffin-“who was not himself unacquainted with grief.”

Some among the congregation could be heard sniffing.

“The young Pearce and his wife lived in London, where Pearce, who taught at Westminster School, turned increasingly toward art as a means of self-expression. He held a number of exhibitions of his work and was a friend of many of the great artistic figures of the day. He returned increasingly to his work as an artist after the death of his sons and seemed to find great consolation in it.”

Israel thought of the telegraph totem poles, and the giant concrete heads, and the bright, childlike sculptures that adorned Pearce’s gardens, and for the first time they made sense.

“After the death of his wife, in 1966, Pearce remarried and returned to live in Ireland with his second wife, Vivian Farrell, the actress. After Vivian’s death, Pearce was to marry and divorce twice more; the triumph, one might say, of hope over experience.” The congregation smiled.

“It is perhaps worth recalling on a day such as today that Pearce stood for Parliament-unsuccessfully-on a number of occasions, and as well as being an artist and philanthropist, he was a keen yachtsman, a cyclist, and as many of you will know, a great letter writer. His was, by any means, a life well lived.”

There was now a steady dabbing of eyes around the church.

“You will all, of course, have your own memories of Pearce-a man distinguished not merely by his worldly achievements, but more importantly by his very self, by his magnanimity, his good humor, and, of course, his wisdom and generosity. Personally, I got to know Pearce only recently, and was lucky enough to witness how he bore the burden of years, and his final illness, with a resolve and with a verve and a style characteristically his own. He was, of course, not always an easy man to get on with-none of us are saints-and we are here today to give thanks for the life of Pearce as he was, not as we might imagine him to have been. He was a man of great passions-and those of us who occasionally felt the lash of his tongue will know that those passions extended to a great dislike of those who he felt were foolish, ignorant, or pretentious, ‘stupid bloody bastards,’ as he called them.

“In short, Pearce Pyper was a man who was fully human, who knew who he was, and who was prepared to share himself and his life with others. Gathered here today, in our grief, we should be mindful of what the Bible teaches us: that to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to laugh, and a time to mourn. As Christians, we believe in the life eternal, and the world to come. But we also believe in the good of this life, and that the lives of the good show us what it means to be truly human. And so today we should not only mourn, but we should celebrate the life of our brother, Pearce Pyper, born twenty-sixth of June 1918. Died twenty-ninth of September 2008.”

More hymns followed-“Praise to the Holiest in the Height,” “Ye Holy Angels Bright.” Hopeless sobbing. Prayers. The blessing. And finally the escape outside.

“Well,” said Ted, who stood smoking outside the church, waiting for Israel and the other pallbearers to load the coffin back into the hearse. “There we are, then. Another man down.”

“Yep,” said Israel.

“Can’t be all bad, if it’s got you in a shirt and tie, mind.”

“Yeah.” Israel wiped at his eyes. Ted had teamed his usual black leather car coat with a black tie and shiny black slip-on shoes.

“Ach, ye’re all beblubbered there, look. Here.” Ted thrust a crumpled, unironed handkerchief into Israel’s hands.

“Thanks.”

“Good elegy,” said Ted.

“Eulogy,” said Israel. “Yes. It was good, wasn’t it?”

“I tell you what he didn’t say about Pearce, though,” said Ted, crushing his cigarette butt under his heel, and bending over to pick it up and pocket it. “Ouch.”

“You all right?”

“Yeah. My back, just. You know what he didn’t say?”

“What?”

“He didn’t mention that the old fella was completely buck mad,” said Ted.

Israel gave a little laugh.

“Mind, takes all sorts, I suppose.”

“Yes,” agreed Israel. “I suppose it does.”

It was a private interment, so Israel drove with Ted back to Pearce’s for the wake. Cars were parked all along the driveway up to the house, and inside there was an atmosphere of unforced joviality, quite different to anything Israel had experienced at any funeral in England. Women were busy serving tea and coffee, and men stood around chatting, in their overcoats. Everyone who was anyone in Tumdrum-which is to say, just about everyone-was there. Sandwiches were piled into pyramids, and bottles of whiskey were being passed casually from hand to hand. Minnie was doing the rounds with a platter of sandwiches.

“Och, Israel,” she said. “Sandwich?”

“What are they?”

“Ham. Ham and cheese. Ham and pickle.”

“Erm. No thanks. I’m vegetarian.”

“Oh, are you? I always forget. There’s crab paste somewhere.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“Lovely service, wasn’t it? I might get him to do mine.”

“Yes,” agreed Israel. “Very good.”

Israel wandered among the crowds, from room to room. Linda Wei waylaid him in the library. She was wearing a man’s dinner jacket and trousers, with a corsage, a pillbox hat, and bright red glasses.

“You’ve heard about the books, have you?” she said.

“Pearce has bequeathed them to the library service?”

“You knew?”

“He mentioned it to me, yeah.”

Linda raised her eyebrows in dissatisfaction.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do with all these,” said Linda, glancing around despairingly at the tens of thousands of leather volumes. “Sell them, probably.”

“Right.”

“Pay for some new computers.”

“Uh-huh.” Israel couldn’t be bothered to take the bait.

“You’re unusually quiet, Armstrong.”

“Yeah, well, you know. Just thinking about Pearce.” He was staring at the space on one wall where a bookshelf had been removed: the shelves that had done for Pearce.

“Have you voted yet?” said Linda.

“No,” said Israel. “I don’t think I’m going to bother.”

“If you don’t vote you’ve no right to complain about whoever gets in.”

“That’s true,” said Israel. “That is very true.”

He made his way out of the library, out onto the terrace, where he found George sitting on a bench, smoking, staring out across Pearce’s garden toward the farm in the distance.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” said Israel.

“I don’t,” said George, stubbing out her cigarette. “I’ve something for you, actually.”

“For me?”

“For your birthday.”

“Really?”

“It is your birthday, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is.”

She took a small package from her handbag.

“It’s a book, I’m afraid,” she said, handing it over.

“I don’t know what to say,” said Israel.

“Thank you?”

“Thanks. Shall I open it?”

“Maybe save it for later,” said George.

“OK.”

They sat in silence together, shivering. Israel sighed.

“Big sigh,” said George.

“Was it?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t belong here,” said Israel.

George laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what? What’s funny about that?”

George took a deep breath.

“Let me tell you a secret, Israel. No one belongs anywhere.”

“But you’re from here. You were born here. You grew up. You’re going to-”

“And you think I don’t ever wish I wasn’t?”

“Well. I don’t know. I just…”

“Everyone’s the same, Israel. We want what we can’t have. That’s the meaning of life, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, is it?”

She turned and looked at him. He looked at her.

His phone rang.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I’ll maybe see you back inside,” said George.

“Yeah. Sure. Fine.”

It was Gloria.

He thought. For a moment.

He let it ring.